Find Your Calling: Career Transition Principles for Veterans
This course provides military veterans with a useful roadmap to transition more smoothly from military service to a new and meaningful civilian career.
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Course Description
Observe and analyze behaviors demonstrated by veterans who have successfully navigated the military-to-civilian career transition.
Differentiate between professional relationships, learn strategies to foster meaningful connections during a military-to-civilian transition, and create an actionable plan to expand and nurture your local network.
Adopt a new framework for exploring career opportunities, emphasizing the importance of critical thinking without distractions, and cultivate a growth mindset to align with personal interests.
Recognize the significance of a deliberate approach to building a personal brand, especially on platforms like LinkedIn, and understand how it contributes to a successful transition and progression in the corporate workforce.
To learn more, you can take the following courses in this series:
What You Will Learn
By the end of this course, learners will be able to:
Model behaviors exhibited by veterans who have successfully made a military-to-civilian career transition.
Identify the differences between various types of professional relationships, discover ways to foster meaningful relationships while making a successful military-to-civilian transition, and design an action plan to expand and grow your network in your local community.
Adopt a new framework to begin thinking about and exploring new career opportunities: understand the importance of having time to yourself to think critically without distractions and harness a growth mindset to serve these interests.
Understand why taking a deliberate approach to building your personal brand, such as on LinkedIn, is so important to making a successful transition and advancing in the corporate workforce.
Discover the importance of "starting with why," differentiating between infinite and finite game thinking, and determining what personally drives you to success to aid in your career transition and development.
Develop ways in which you can be entrepreneurial in your decision-making in order to create better choices for yourself, your family, and your career.
Grow your emotional intelligence and identify your internal identity, the virtues and character strengths that make you who you are today.
Course Outline
Module 1: Introduction
Module 2: Pietas (Citizenship)
Module 3 Prudentia (Critical Thinking)
Module 4: Veritas (Authenticity)
Module 5: Gravitas (Passion)
Module 6 Humanitas (Choice and Creativity)
Module 7: Nosce Te Ipsum ("Know Thyself": Emotional Intelligence)
Module 8: Course Wrap Up
Instructors
Before joining the Columbia University Center for Veteran Transition and Integration as a Curriculum Designer in 2016, R.J. served as an Associate Dean of Students at Columbia University’s School of General Studies where he directed the Academic Resource Center and served as the lead instructor for University Studies, a transition course for first-year, non-traditional students. An award-winning teacher, R.J. has advised college students at Columbia, Cambridge, and Harvard Universities, and has taught courses in English and American literature, literary history, close reading, academic skill-building, and English for Speakers of Other Languages. R.J. holds a Bachelor of Arts in English and anthropology from Columbia University (2003), a Master of Letters in English literature from the University of Cambridge (2005), and is currently pursuing doctoral work in English literature.
Michael Abrams joined the Marine Corps shortly following the September 11, 2001 attacks and served on active duty for eight years, which included a deployment to Afghanistan with an infantry company as the artillery forward observer. After leaving active duty, Michael attended New York University’s Stern School of Business graduating with an M.B.A. in Finance and Entrepreneurship & Innovation. While attending business school, he founded FourBlock to help bridge the gap between returning service members and the business community. The program is a university accredited, semester-long course that educates and prepares transitioning veterans for meaningful careers in corporate America. FourBlock is in nearly twenty cities across the country, educating and serving hundreds of transitioning veterans each semester. Michael also served as the first executive director of the Columbia University Center for Veteran Transition and Integration. The center is dedicated to creating and supporting evidence-based programming that enables returning service members with reaching their academic and career potential.